Ecomobile: a mobile agent ecosystem for distributed network management

The growing demand for Internet services and the future multi-layer telecommunication networks makes network management tasks more and more difficult to handle. Mobile software agents constitute an emerging and promising technology which is particularly well-suited to inherently distributed tasks. Several open issues regarding agent behavior, population size, task design, etc. however remain to be studied before a powerful mobile multi-agent system can be widely deployed. This paper presents Ecomobile, a mobile agent middleware, which is self-regulated and dynamically controlled with respect to real network conditions. Network management tasks, such as path allocation, monitoring or routing, can be implemented by means of a new computing and mobility model.